(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a method to detect anchorperson segment in news reporting, and more particularly, to one detects anchorperson segment by taking advantage of visual characteristics to provide the basis to divide news into various categories.
(b) Description of the Prior Art
Using local features for identification has been so far the method most frequently used to locate a human face in an image. Local features applied in this method include eyes, nose tip, lips or cheeks, forehead, etc. Local features are compared with the picture detected in the image to confirm results of identification. Therefore, confirming the location of those local features becomes a critical step in the process of identifying a human face.
Methodology of locating the local features including eyes, nose and lips from an image of a human face can be roughly classified into two ways. One way refers to the image processing method, e.g., filtering, image morphological operation, or thresholding operation for locating the candidate positions of the probable facial features before confirming the position of the features among those candidate positions. Another way involves the use of the graph matching method, i.e., a model of human face is expressed by correlation graph of features. Wherein, locations of those features are defined as nodes and the relative locations among features are expressed in edges between two nodes. The image processing method is applied to solve a feature value associate to each node; and in turn, the travel of the model in the image is borrowed to locate the positions of the human face features through the graph comparison method.
In the image processing method such as that taught in U.S. Pat. No. 5,805,475 first a threshold must be defined by solving a preferred value using the statistical method based on experimental value or accumulated experimental value whereas the threshold is usually the key to identification results. As disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,805,475, both of the image morphological operation and the thresholding operation involve determination of multiple thresholds. This approach for solving the threshold by adopting the heuristic method to solve the threshold must be always modified depending on the performance of the image observed. That significantly makes the difficulty in the applying the heuristic method, thus to fail a fast and effective identification of the human features in the image.
In the image comparison method such that as taught in U.S. Pat. No. 5,222,939, each node is given a set of feature values. These values must be solved in the image pending detection in order to compare with a graph model; and comparatively intensive point locations must be retrieved even through it is not necessarily to solve each pixel. U.S. Pat. No. 5,222,939 is characterized in direct search on 2D space of the image and comparatively complicated values of features for the description of the reference human face image (e.g., 2D spectrum must be solved). Therefore, whenever a human face features of the image pending detection is compared, a process of multiple operations and comparisons must be done to identify the features of the human face in the image, meaning an enormous load to the system and thus failure in improving the use efficiency. Therefore the methods to locate face features in an image of the prior art do exist many defectives that warrant further improvement.